


Olympiad

by Emby_M



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Coping, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Mentions of Percy, Surprises, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, big surprises which i can't tag for but are g-rated, keyleth and vax lived together briefly before vax's death, keyleth thought she was fine but she's not, mentions of percy/vex/vexahlia/pike, post-vax death, the surprise is not pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 13:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16811155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emby_M/pseuds/Emby_M
Summary: "She feels like sleeping until spring. When the world will come again, and the last of her tears will be shed, and she will carry him on like a beacon. When her steps will be light and she will feel again like she can dance and sing and laugh."-It's been three-quarters of a year since Vax died, and Keyleth is taking it worse than she thought.Also, a surprising visit.





	Olympiad

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't posted anything here in a year -- I haven't been writing much that I feel is finished enough to share. So this may or may not be resolved over the next few... uh. I have no idea.  
> That being said, please leave kudos and comments if you're so inclined!

It's a quiet, snowy night.

January had settled like a shroud on her shoulders, heavy and mournful, the unending night threatening to subsume her if she wasn't careful.

The bleakest time of year, when winter has stretched too long and too cold and too dark, when it felt like winter might continue forever, never ceasing.

When the world could be swallowed, and she wouldn't notice.

The house is still too quiet. Not as though his rustling and murmurs were loud, no. But the thrum of his presence has been gone for long months.

She feels like sleeping until spring. When the world will come again, and the last of her tears will be shed, and she will carry him on like a beacon. When her steps will be light and she will feel again like she can dance and sing and laugh.

For now, she toddles around the house, pulling thick blankets around her shoulders to hold off the aching cold that has nestled itself in her ribs.

Pike tells her this is natural. That mourning like this was normal. But that if she felt hopeless, if she stopped eating, stopped talking, to see Pike.

She knows she can trust in Pike. And she knows she can pick herself up. That she will be alright when the first crocuses peep from the snow, when that first warm breeze caresses her face, when the night sky is bright and illuminated instead of the low ceiling it is now.

She will be alright.

But right now, the only joy she finds is that -- strangely -- the paperwhites on the back porch had bloomed. She had brought them inside, eager for their sweet scent.

They sit now on the kitchen table. The kitchen table with her books and bag shoved onto his side, crammed into an empty space. It has forgotten food.

It's midnight when there is a knock at the door.

It takes a force of will to stir her. For moments, she sits motionless, perched dead-eyed on a chair, until the knock comes once more. Like moving through water, she drifts through the house, donning her quilted robe and settling her mussed hair behind her horned headdress. The world ebbs over her, slow and undulating, far off and strange.

Until she opens the door.

And there, standing there, is someone she knows.

He smiles, his little pointed ears perking with the movement, and murmurs softly, "Hi Key."

She knows him. Of course she knows him. The set of his shoulders, even hidden beneath a mantle of iridescent, shimmering feathers. The quirk of his earth-rich eyes. That silky hair, pulled back and dark like the night. She could recognize him by touch, by scent, by taste alone.

She glances -- left, right, above. She expects a crowd, or an assassin, come to use him as a diversion or her as an amusement. When he knits his brow in worry, she worries that she's gone too long without food, that she has gone entirely too long without company, and that this man is a figment, some half-dumb shape that would hold her in her grief.

"You have to go," she says, her eyes aching in her head, like the sadness was tugging her face downwards, elongating it.

He cocks his head -- the right way, the right angle, vibrantly, excellently similar to a dead man.

"Key, I- it's me," he says, in his voice. He reaches a gloved hands towards her, but she flinches back.

He- smiles, shyly. The way he does - did. And reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a very small red feather, sparkling gold on the end.

She had given it to him. The breathless gift left behind from the spring's first robin, that spread a massive smile against her face.

She takes it, with hesitant hands.

"If this is a joke," she says, biting each word like grisly meat, "then I swear-"

And she finds she is in his arms again. And it's him. It's so undeniably him. That subtle, spiced scent, hidden under leather and plumage, that warm, precise strength he holds her with.

It's Vax.

It's really, actually Vax.

It isn't a replica or a hallucination, or some ill-intentioned prankster. It's Vax.

"You're- You really are, right?" She murmurs, into his collar, like saying the words will vanish him again, forever.

"Yes," he murmurs against her wild hair, in a rueful tone, "but just for a day."

Had it been snowing, when he arrived? Had she noticed? Had she been crying?

She doesn't know. But she is crying now. And it is snowing now.

The snowflakes clump and melt into their hair. Vax is warm, and his heart beats, evenly, regularly, strongly, through his skin, where she's pressed her ear to listen.  
And the tears she weeps are hot. Not like before. Not like the wintertime tears which rolled lazily, unbidden, uninhibited from her glassy eyes, freezing cold & sticky paths across her cheeks in a home she had forgotten to give hearth-fire to.

And it hurts to know that she had been so fine for months -- that she had truly been okay, smiling and laughing with her friends, making new recipes and planting a garden and reveling in the familial adventures of her dearest friends and in-laws.

But when winter had set in deep, and that first dark afternoon happened, the fight left her. The energy she had pushed hard had vanished, and it couldn't hide the loneliness, the grief that had been left behind.

She cries for him, and for herself. For herself who had given up, drowned slowly in the loneliness, for the woman who had promised to be strong, but was here instead on her front porch dead-eyed and hungry.

He holds her.

He holds her and presses tiny kisses to her hairline, nose nuzzling into her curls.

The snow falls.

And sniffling, stomach aching with hunger she only noticed now, she reaches up and presses a kiss to his mouth, which is the same as it had ever been.

And then, for the first time in a long while, she smiles a little. She smiles a little, cupping his face, and asks, "Do you want lentil soup?"

"Yes," he says, clutching her arms, "I'm so hungry."

She wipes her face of the last of the tears away and takes him inside.

He notices right away the darkness of the house, the lingering dust and cobwebs. She can see the discovery play out on his face, but he says nothing, only smiles and takes off his coat, hanging it on the coat-rack like he used to.

"Want me to help?" he says, rolling up the sleeves of his inner shirt -- now dyed a deep gray.

She tells him he can sit down, but he shrugs and says he's restless. So he takes up the broom and starts sweeping away the dust while she gets the hearthfire going.

He hums softly as he works, a strange unfamiliar song. The fire takes, and wakes slowly from its long rest.

"Has it all been... alright?" She says, finding words lacking.

They had all been dead, at some point, but this was -- different, this had been-

This had been real, this time. That there would be no new memories with him, no new quirks to learn, nothing to share with him.

He looks over, and smiles a little. "It's been fine. Weird. It took some getting used to. But it's been fine."

She plucks down some pickled vegetables. They might be a bit strange in the lentil soup, but she hasn't left the house in a while. Honeyed carrots, dried celery slices, thankfully a fresh onion (although it's softened, and started to grow a stalk from its tip). Canned tomatoes, made that summer with the help of Pike and Grog and Vex, a just-barely-pregnant Vex who knew but told them nothing.

She wonders if he knows yet, as she pulls down the firm waxed-paper bag of lentils, looking over at him.

"Have you visited anyone else, yet?"

He turns, her broom filled with cobwebs. He shrugs, a little. "No, not today. I just sort of wanted to see you."

She smiles, opening up the bag and pouring out roughly the amount she needs. The unwarmed house was -- good, she supposes, had kept the duck-bone stock Percy had delivered ("The family recipe. Very good for sadness," he said) from spoiling. She opens the glass jar and breathes deeply of a savory, unctuous broth.

It had been too long without food.

It had been- days enough where the count gets wibbly, and she isn't quite sure how long it's really been. Longer than four, five days. If you count the days she got by on soda crackers, pieces of cheese, raw vegetables, it's stretched even further. Maybe since Percy visited. A few days after Candlenights, when they had noticed she hadn't joined any of them and sent Percy to say hello.

("You look like I once did, schatzi. I am not telling you to get rid of your grief -- I would need to be a hypocrite for that -- but we worry. No, I will not tell Pike if you don't want me to. All I ask is that you're safe. Go to market before the New Year's, ah?")

She cleans off some of the flavoring on the preserves, adding them into the oiled pot over the hearth-fire.

"Do you know- about Percy and Vex?"

He looks over again, lean and handsome, his dark hair shimmering and swaying with his sweeping. "That she's pregnant, right?"

"Yes," she says, kneeling and stirring the newly-added vegetables, "How did you-?"

He looks at her, and makes -- a semblance of a smile. It might fool someone else, but it doesn't convince her.

He bites his lip.

"I'll tell you once the soup simmering, ah? Explain all this. It's complicated."

She sweats the onions, furrowing her brow.

When she steals glances at him, he is glancing back, lighting the candles around the kitchen with careful magic.

Now that she's calm, pulled from her dismal state, it occurs that this is all very strange.

Why was he here? And why was he -- real? She had felt his warmth, heard his heart; Were those illusions or-

She stares at him.

Carefully, she pours in the rest of the ingredients, grinding the spices in her mill as she puts them in. The whole kitchen fills with the scent of grains of paradise, a buttery, coriander-like scent.

She wipes her hands on her housejacket, and finally stands.

The kitchen is warm now, lit softly by the lanterns, evenly spaced. He fishes into his bag, the soft material of his shirt caving in further than she remembered. He's lost some weight.

It had been nine months since he died. So much time, and yet, none at all.

She wonders if she's different. How the winter changed her, the way her hair curls behind her headband, if her skin has sallowed without sleep.

"It smells good," he says, finally finding what he needed in his bag. He smiles at it, strangely, and then hands it up to her.

"There, I'll give that to you now. We can flip it together when I leave."

It's a small hourglass.

It's - small, about the length of her pointer finger, and about as wide as her thumb. Inside one of the glass bulbs is some -- ash, maybe, or dark sand. It rustles when she shakes it.

"What-?" She says, but he takes her hand.

"I'll explain," he says, standing suddenly. "Let's go sit in our chairs?"

She finds, instead of words, stifling, anxious air. She wants to tell him - that she turned his chair around, almost gave it to someone else, that looking at it over time became painful and heavy.

She wonders if she pushed off mourning for too long. If- if she hadn't pretended she was fine, hasn't rigorously pushed off even the concept of mourning and being lonely, if it would have been better.

He leads her into the sitting room, warmer now from the hearth.

He sees the chair turned around, stuffed into the farthest corner, and lets go of her hand. She can't even look at it, but he laughs, breathlessly, and goes to pull it out again.

"I- Even from the moment I left, I was thinking of you."

He sets the chair across from hers, tugging her closer so they can sit. He hooks a foot between the legs of her side table and drags it across the wood floor, to sit between them.

"I thought of you every moment -- and I told the Raven Queen as much. And-"

He smiles a little bit, but his eyes - are sad.

"I have an acquaintance over there. Lovely gentleman, beautiful dark skin, shining golden eyes, a careful voice -- I would call him beautiful, in any plane. And he's been there longer -- much longer. He works as a- recollection office, I suppose, collecting souls who are marked for death but haven't returned to the Raven Queen. Right?"

"Right?" She says, laughing, a little, like he expects her to know anything about the other planes.

"So he can go anywhere -- any plane, any time. But I- can't. I'm a champion. With different rules. So the rules for me leaving the plane are different. More restrictive."

She nods.

"But -- I've been back. A few times. I can't go often, and I can't take corporeal form. But I can come see people. So I've visited Pike and Scanlan, and I've visited Vex and Percy, and- and I've visited you, a couple times."

There is a long, steady moment of silence. She feels the urge to get up and stir the soup, get out of this conversation, this revelation. There is a turmoil inside her, of the indignant things she'd like to say, the miserable things she'd like to say, the adoring things she'd like to say -- and she'd rather just avoid it all. The idea that he watched her faking smiles and falling deeply into a melancholy sends a deep, ruddy flush against her skin. The fact that he cared enough to always be looking only deepens the color.

"I- sorry." He says, dropping his head to the side, "I wanted to tell you. But I don't -- I can't do much in that form. And I was-"

He scrunches his mouth into a distorted line, like he was rolling the words around in his mouth.

"I guess I was afraid that me visiting you would make it worse. I kept- watching you, coming to visit, heard everyone talking about how you were receding into yourself, and when I would look through the scrying glass back in my own plane, I could only see you painfully smiling, like it hurt to breathe and-"

He shakes his head, and then looks up at her.

"Well, I was supposed to come visit you in the spring. But I expedited my trip."

The words hang between them. Unspoken.

"So," she murmurs, "This?"

He shrugs, not really saying anything yet.

"So- I can peer into this plane anytime, as long as I have free time and my scrying glass. And I can visit maybe -- once every two months or so, incorporeally. But this -- this."

He plucks the hourglass from her hands.

"I can only build enough energy and get the permission to come corporeally once every four years."

The absence of that hourglass feels heavy.

"Four years," she murmurs.

"Yeah," he says, turning the hourglass this way and that.

"That's... unfair."

"Yeah."

"That- That's unfair!" she says, leaning into him.

"Yeah," he says, that rueful smile tugging his lips, "But it's better than being dead-dead."

She slumps back against the chair.

It's all so much.

"I'll be here until sundown tomorrow," he says, as if it makes it better.


End file.
